Segregation is Bad

| Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The other day I learned that Stratholme has been completely split in half. There is now a permanently shut gate between live and dead sides.

Bad move, Blizzard.

What benefit does this provide? Were there too many people wandering into the wrong side? Oh god, the horror. Players might complete an instance in a non-optimal manner!

This causes an actual problem even: the random postbox keys for the Postmaster boss can still include the mailbox in dead side. This means that on some runs they will potentially be unable to summon him, since to do so would require manually running in the other side (requeueing will reset the instance), a daunting and time-consuming task given that players could be coming from anywhere. Three keys drop, three are needed, and there are only six boxes. That means a one in six chance that a group cannot summon the boss.

A change that gives no benefit but gives an unreasonably high chance of blocking players from content. An excellent job. Well done. One might say, Mission Accomplished.

The anti-fun team has struck again.

2 comments:

Tesh said...

Ah, the fun things that happen when all the ramifications for choices aren't thought out. Makes me wonder occasionally if the live team making relevant decisions has played the stuff they are changing.

Will said...

Blizzard is to a large degree becoming like a DnD Dungeon Master who is bound and determined that his players will follow the story he sets.

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